


Want me first and foremost, keep me company

by SegaBarrett



Category: Chess - Rice/Ulvaeus/Andersson
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Kid - Freeform, Platonic-ish Relationships, Pregnancy, What can I say it's these two
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-23
Updated: 2018-01-23
Packaged: 2019-03-08 11:22:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13457190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Freddie finds out a secret Florence is hiding, and decides to see if he can help and be helped.





	Want me first and foremost, keep me company

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own Chess, and I make no money from this.
> 
> A/N: Title is from "Marry Me a Little" from Company :) (YEAH RAUL ESPARZA :D)

Freddie Trumper was almost certain that he was starting to lose his hair. When he ran his hand down the back of his scalp, he could feel his hairline, and he was almost certain that that wasn’t supposed to happen.

He was going to make it back from Bangkok, but his hair wasn’t. Good hair left behind.

He nearly started giggling at the absurdity of it all, and that might not have been a good thing, considering he was standing in line at the airport. People tended to look negatively on random hysterical displays on the way through customs for some reason.

He removed his backpack and watched it slide through the conveyor belt. He wondered if anyone had decided to try to ride the conveyor belt, and whether they had ended up being badly injured. Probably – that was an urge that it would be best not to pursue.

“Mr. Trumper? Over here, please,” a female TSA cop told him. He let out a sigh and stepped off to the side as they questioned him about a pair of candles he had purchased in a tourist shop in Bangkok. Apparently not satisfied with his explanation – they went well with his apartment décor – they set to word swabbing them to, they explained, make sure they weren’t explosives.

Fair enough, Freddie figured – if they were explosives, he didn’t want them.

“Okay, you’re fine,” the female cop said.

“Hey, aren’t you…” began her colleague, and the woman shook her had at him. 

He was considering whether it was better to be recognized or not when he head-on collided with someone.

“Shit, sorry,” he heard a voice murmur, and he could only try to control his eyes widening when he saw Florence Vassy standing there before him, trying to gather up the contents of her purse. 

“Florence!” he exclaimed, staring at her. A little voice inside his head told him he should be helping her gather her things, but he found himself staring dumbly instead. It was as if she was looking at a ghost, or maybe a mirage. Maybe she wasn’t really here; maybe he had drank too much or hit his head and this was only what he hoped to see, what he hoped to save.

She looked up and let out an exasperated sigh.

“Freddie… I can’t right now, okay? I’m late for my flight. It’s very important.”

“Where are you headed?”

She shrugged.

“Los Angeles.”

“Why are you headed there?”

“It’s not important, Freddie.” She scooped up, last of all, a tiny dented white box.

Freddie had no reason to recognize what it was, but he did. Maybe he’d watched enough commercials in the hotel room for that image to stick.

It was one of those drug-store pregnancy tests, not quite out of the box. Was it two plus signs that women were looking for, or not looking for? Freddie couldn’t remember – the biological clock was always ticking for them, wasn’t it? Either that or they were trying to avoid it as long as possible and, even after they had kids, they wanted to act like they didn’t.

He didn’t understand. 

“You’re knocked up?” he blurted out, realizing as he said it that either way it was a horrible thing to say, but there it was anyway. 

She flinched, then crossed her arms in front of herself for a brief moment before reaching down and grabbing the box, putting it back in her purse and glaring at him.

There was a long moment where he was sure she wouldn’t talk at all. 

Then, in a voice he almost didn’t hear, “Yes.”

“Sergievsky’s?” Freddie prompted. He made his voice gentler this time.

She nodded. 

“What are you going to do?” 

She looked away before moving her arms up into a big shrug.

“I’ve got a job waiting for me in LA. I suppose I’ll decide everything else once I hit the ground.”

“It’s a lot,” Freddie told her.

“I know,” Florence said dryly.

“It sounds…” Freddie lifted his head to meet her eyes. “Kind of scary. And lonely. Being in a new place… by yourself… and…” He paused. “I could come with you.”

Florence squeezed her arms against her chest a little tighter and looked at him. 

“Freddie, I know that you’re saying that you grew up. And I want to believe you. But this is bigger than you and me. You can’t just… say you’re going to be there on a whim when there’s a child involved.”

“It’s not a whim, Florence. This year, I’ve had a lot of time to think. And without you… I don’t like who I am. I didn’t always like who I was anyway but… you always saw the best I could be. So please, give me a chance. Let me come with you.”

He watched as her shoulders sagged and she sighed slowly. 

“Freddie,” she began, then mumbled. “Fine. Do what you want. But don’t get in my way.”

***

Florence Vassy wasn’t entirely sure how she had ended up in the same bed with Freddie Trumper all over again. She had insisted, first, that he get his own place, and then that he sleep on the couch. But here they were, curled up in each other’s arms all over again. She couldn’t even pretend that it didn’t feel right, in some weird cosmic way.

She yawned as she stretched her arms, pushing herself into a sitting position so she could move into the apartment’s tiny kitchen and start up breakfast. The world had been moving quite quickly, lately, and she was having some trouble in wrapping her head around it.

She missed Anatoly and the way he would feel beside her, thin and narrow and bushy-haired, never cold even in the middle of the winter (the way he would chuckle and say, Siberia, whenever she bundled up in her winter coat). She wondered what he would say if he knew, if it would have changed his decision to leave. She almost hoped it wouldn’t – it would be such a cliché, to stay for a child only.

That isn’t what Freddie is doing, is it? She wondered as she cracked a few eggs, starting a plate sunny-side-up, just the way she knew Freddie liked them.

“Florence? I woke up and you weren’t there.”

She turned to see Freddie in the doorway to the kitchen, looking as pitiful as always.

Somehow she’d end up raising two children instead of one, she suspected. But maybe that was okay. She’d have to see.

***

Freddie’s nose brushed against Florence’s neck. 

“It’s going to be okay, I promise,” he whispered in a soothing tone she hadn’t known he possessed. His hands were on her hips and he was breathing in time with her. “We’re going to make this work.”

“But Freddie,” Florence began. Nine months had flown by and now she was at a standstill, waiting for this baby to be born. She was flooded with panic every time she considered the reality of the situation – what had she been thinking? “If something goes wrong… If something goes wrong you’ll…”

Freddie squeezed her hand tightly.

“I will. But it won’t.”

“I don’t even think I can move.”

“Then we’ll have the kid right here in the bedroom,” Freddie declared with a grin. “It’ll be a great story for them to tell their friends.”

“Ugh, don’t,” Florence picked up a pair of socks and flung them at his head. He smiled and rubbed her back.

“Have you thought more about a name?” he inquired, and she nodded.

“I was… listening to some old records. There’s an opera called Aida. I was thinking… that would make a nice name if we had a girl.”

“What’s that about?”

Florence sat up a little more. 

“There’s an Egyptian warrior who falls in love with a Nubian princess… But their love is forbidden so he gets locked in a tomb to die, and she walls herself in the same tomb so that she’ll die with him.”

Freddie curled up his nose.

“That sounds depressing. And you want to name our daughter after that? Women, with their tragic love stories!”

Florence playfully bopped him on the nose.

“You’ll come around.”

“No, I won’t. We should name her… Regina.”

“After the Queen? Seriously? You want to stealth-name our daughter after a chess piece.”

“It’s not that obvious, Florence. No one would get it but us.”

“We’re not doing it.”

***

Florence was crying; she was screaming. Freddie didn’t know what to do around so much screaming and crying; it didn’t seem like there was anything he could do to help. Even if it wasn’t helping, he’d settle for just quieting her down.

“Florence, everything is going to be okay,” he promised, but he wasn’t sure that that was really true. Could someone really push an eight-pound being out of themselves and emerge as “okay” on the other side? Maybe that was what had made Freddie’s mother so angry. 

“Freddie, what the hell? Why don’t you shut up? Why did you never learn how to shut up?” Florence railed. “Just sit there and hold my damn hand!”

Freddie’s mouth, for the first time in his life, clamped shut.

Even he knew this wasn’t a good time to get the last word, as it could turn out to be the last word he would ever have.

***

Aida Regina Sergievsky-Trumper was nine pounds, eight ounces, and, in Freddie’s opinion, very loud. 

She was also very cute, but the loud had a distinct tendency to win out over most other features. 

Freddie loved when she would use her tiny, chubby fingers to poke at him, to cling to him and demand that he never leave. He loved when she would sleep against his chest, a warm weight that made him feel a sudden crushing responsibility along with an odd right-ness he didn’t know how to describe.

They learned to sleep when the baby slept, to play chess when the baby was simply napping and due to wake up any moment.

Freddie found his first gray hair when Aida was eight months old.

***

Florence was not as young as she had once been. She was noticing a few strands of gray, a few specks here and there that hadn’t been there the day before, the week before.

Freddie, of course, refused to believe he was showing his age at all. She chuckled when he dyed his hair (“Dark hair is in fashion these days” – since when had Freddie Trumper cared about fashion?), she agreed with him when he said that no, his back was not going, he just shouldn’t have lifted up that entire box all in one sitting (“You’re supposed to bend from the knees,” he told her, like some kind of training manager in a warehouse), and she fully embraced being the bad guy when they told Aida that she was not under any circumstances backpacking through Europe instead of finishing high school.

The day after she finally graduated, Florence and Freddie led her to their little two-door sedan and sat her in the back, like she was a kid again.

“Is this some kinda life talk? Because…”

“You know what?” Florence said. “You’re a pain in the ass.”

She put her hands on the steering wheel.

“We’re going to the airport. There’s somebody who we’d like you to meet.”


End file.
